I was thinking about something hilarious that might happen with OP’s proposed idea, though. You might see coalitions of players (organized through Discord, probably) that scrape this “bazaar” for all the items that have any practical/use or value, cleaning them out, and leaving only the “trash” in. Then they either vendor or shatter the items they don’t actually intend to use. Conversely, they could do the opposite, but that’s doubtful, because it sort of invites a counter-group to form that does the former.
It just screams all kinds of abuse/manipulation and ultimately defeating the purpose of the feature.
You overestimate malicious activity. Most of the time, stuff like that results in some sort of benefit or profit for those abusing the system. This has no benefit, so maybe they do that once and get a big “Ha Ha” out of it, but its a lot of work for nothing. Its literally just griefing.
I’ll take that over Bots/Gold Farmers every day and twice on Sunday.
I don’t think I do. I’ve seen people do more for less just to troll/grief in gaming.
Not if it means we don’t have trade and the proposed system is useless. I’d rather have trade in the first place, but I just don’t see this idea going anywhere.
Neither was I, its a fantastic idea and will work great.
Its literally how most MMORPG guilds actually work. (Guild bank, people can take items out if they are in the guild and of a “Trusted” rank, etc.) You don’t see those games “breaking” because of it. Instead, you see the game company making more, newer, exciting content version after version, because they don’t have to waste a second of time on “economy”.
Economies don’t belong in games. Games are meant to be a pass-time, not a job. Period.
It’s a terrible idea. Comparing it to guilds is a false equivalence. There’s a big difference between friends/friendly associates and the general public. It’s also a false equivalence to compare a game like this to an MMO–especially advocating for a feature present in guilds within a game that features an economy. It’s just so hilariously ill-conceived.
Premise is incorrect. Plenty of games feature them and some games are arguably about them. Just because it has one doesn’t make it a job. Period.
If you want to refine the idea to address the issues presented with its conception by saying something other than “no u” or “people totally won’t do the thing they very obviously can,” there might be something worth exploring, but as it stands, this concept is pretty much /thread.
You’ve presented absolutely nothing which would hinder this idea in any way. No one, not even a bunch of people, could cause any real issues with it without getting banned as a result. That pretty much shuts down any shenanigans. What is left is a great way for players to share items between themselves without allowing bots/gold farmers to infiltrate the game.
The issue here is that those same guild banks exist in tandem with a larger economy in most MMOs. They don’t replace the economy they are a supplemental system between friends, which LE much like PoE may even have as part of a guild system.
The game company does have to spend time working on systems related to economies in these cases. Even if they didn’t, alleviating resources in one area of a game doesn’t mean that the overall game will always get more, newer and exciting content version after version as a result.
I would reference WoW’s current LFG tool as an example of something that should be easy to police and ban for unintended behaviors in it. If you check it out literally 70%+ of postings in the dungeon channel can be sales or boosting which they have said is bannable and yet for years they have been unable to properly enforce this policy. Enforcing policies to deal with people abusing the system is harder than just saying ban them and everything will be fine.
This is a more elaborate way of saying some of the stuff I was, along with some great points of your own, so thanks.
Ultimately, even if you could make the system and unabusable (yeah, right), it would still leave LE in an non-competitive state within the genre because there are so many people who do want to trade–they’re just sick of PoE’s horrible system for it. At that point, the best it could hope for is to be talked about the same way that Grim Dawn is: A solid game experience, but lacks the long-term playability that its competitors offer.
Trade with an Economy is a bane on video games, especially ARPGs. The idea proposed here allows trade with no economy. Players who desire an economy can day trade on the stock market or buy Bitcoin. Everyone is happy.
You can’t abuse the system because of limited inventory space. And a tiny code change would add in limitations if someone abuses it.
There are literally only 11 Item slots on a character (not counting Idols.) If you’re using the system as intended, you aren’t going to take 2 armors on the same character, or two helms, or 3+ rings, etc.
Requiring participation in the system (donating an item to take an item) is another
The Item Level limit I proposed keeps out fake accounts just taking high level items.
Furthermore, griefing (in general, not related to trade) has to be handled by EHG. If EHG isn’t going to ban griefers, the game is already dead and we don’t need to even talk about Trade. So it is safe to assume EHG will suspend/ban griefers, and that becomes a non-issue.
All that’s left is a non-economy item sharing system that is far superior to a game “economy”, since people can simply search for items others donated that would be good for their next character.
This reminds me of guild stash in PoE. But that was different in a couple of important ways:
Smaller community (like 100 people). Easy to identify and kick abusers. People could literally dump a stack of chaos or a tabula in gstash1 (first tab) to share with someone they just met on guild chat and it wouldn’t get sniped right away.
Trash items that abusers wouldn’t want. Leveling uniques, low tier rares, splinters/trash currencies, etc.
If PoE had a gstash for every player and it had HH/mirror/exalts in it, that would fall apart because of the economy. Even without trading, you’d still have supply and demand. Low supply and high demand would generate the same incentives to snipe valuable items regardless of the UI (trade window/gstash) being used. There’s at least three major holes they’d have to cover just off the top of my head:
a) Who takes stuff out. In a F2P game this is a nightmare because people can just keep making new accounts. But LE makes this much easier being buy-to-play.
b) How much they take out. “Much” depends on how abundant the specific thing is relative to the player population.
c) How much good stuff they take out. “Good” is basically a synonym for “demand”, which is subject to change. For example, low life uniques are good right now, but what if they introduced ward sustain affixes or the equivalent of CI? That could change overnight. Without a traditional market economy you’d need other metrics (e.g. what kind of stuff gets sniped the most/least).
Even solving a-c doesn’t address the fact that it’s like an NPC shop with extra steps. Why not just add better vendors to SSF? You could argue that it’s better social interaction than trade, and I’d agree - for a smaller community where you know who’s helping you out and when they did it. It’s not as personal when you pick up items asynchronously and anonymously (e.g. the guy who dumped it logged out X hours before and you don’t know what X equals or who they are).
I’m sure the legions of gold farmers, bots & the like that plague pay to play games like WoW truely quake in their boots at the thought of having an account banned.
By Blizzard.
Who have the resources to look into that #### as hard as they want.
Unlike EHG who have to be a bit more thoughtful about it.
But I’m not saying your basic idea is a bad one. Just that “but people will be banned & stuff and that’ll stop them!” isn’t going to stop them.
This premise is simply false. I know it’s the impetus for this concept–indeed, the thread itself–but it simply isn’t true. The sheer volume of players who seek and enjoy in-game economies defies this.
As for telling them to go day trade or something, get real. That’s disingenuous as hell and I think you know it. It’s the same thing as if I tell you, “Hey, Torchlight 1 has no economy. It’s perfect. You should just play that and leave us alone. Everyone is happy.” I don’t think I need to explain why it’s not persuasive or relevant, but it is precisely what you are doing here.
No problem. Just make more characters/account and/or steal accounts if necessary.
The whole point is there’s nothing stopping them from using the system outside of its intended use. This is begging the question.
Items inherently have unequal value, even if the game codifies them to be “similar.” They can trade an item that the game sees as similar and take one that players value as higher. Repeat ad nauseum until you’re left with trash.
Not really. Bots can easily get characters high enough to meet any arbitrary level requirement you place. Accounts can be hacked to bypass this as well.
Others already tackled this one. Don’t know why you think it’s such a sure thing.
All that’s left is a system people don’t want that is inferior to most existing systems and will make players resentful of the game/devs for not just having trade like they said in the kick starter.
The fact that players enjoy economies in games is the problem. No player enjoys a game economy where they play casually, and over 6 years accumulate enough “currency” to get 1 cool item from the trade market, while no-lifers who play 16 hrs a day have dozens of characters decked out in every uber item in the game (repeatedly) and post how uber they are on Youtube.
It is 100% safe to say no player likes in-game economies except for those uber no-lifer types, as they exploit it at the expense of everyone else.
Its high time that kind of nonsense is shown the door. Per Llama’s quote, it seems the EHG devs do, in fact, have something non-standard in their minds (if you go by his post as a direct quote, which it seems it was) so something like this idea (or even more radically different) might just be in the works. I seriously doubt they would say that in that quote if they had plans for Vanilla Trade/Vanilla Auction House 101.
I’m going to ignore this as it appears to say that players enjoying things is bad.
This will always be a problem/tension between those who have more time to play & those who have less. Other tension points include those between higher skilled players and lower skilled players, but I don’t think you’d countenance removing all the difficult stuff from a game.
It was, which is why I included the link as well so you can see for yourself if you don’t believe me.
I think you have outdone yourself. I’m not sure I even need to argue against this. Other people can simply read this, see how arrogant, out of touch, and unrealistic it is and see how you defeated your own thread.
If this was supposed to be “The case for trade with no economy,” case settled: It lost.
